Something about redheaded sopranos just makes for a great disc. Patricia Petibon has been rocking the soundwaves with turns in "Carmina Burana" and Italian Baroque arias, and now goes into the more a seductive range of Latin and Iberian art song.

Spanish melancholy is a fierce, proud and frequently angry condition . . . It needs an extraordinary voice to express its facets over an entire recital, and it has found that in Patricia Petibon, whose experience in Baroque and French showpieces is matched by a capacity for utterances that plumb the depths of despair. She hits peak form with the aria for soprano and cellos by Villa-Lobos, where her breadth of phrasing and tonal warmth achieve simplicity and directness . . . ["Adios Granada"] is heartbreaking in its desolation . . . Four new songs by Nicolas Bacri are straightforward and quietly subtle . . . ultimately affecting. This will surely be a hit release -- hear almost any track and you'll want the rest.

Record Review /
Robert Maycock,
BBC Music Magazine (London) / 01. January 2012

. . . the disc is a success. For this ambitious cross-section of Spanish vocal music, Petibon has attempted to find a variety of vocal colors, ranging from refined to the raw . . . there is much to enjoy in Petibon's work in familiar excerpts, as well as in a new cycle composed especially for the soprano. Granados is well served in two of his "maja"-themed "Tonadillas", deeply felt and delivered with the requisite emotional wallop . . . the "tarantula" number from Giménez's "La tempranica", is given a hyper-theatrical, hilarious performance, contrasted with Petibon's impassioned treatment of the gorgeous "Petenera" from Moreno Torroba's "La marchenera" . . . Petibon offers her most authentically Spanish-flavored vocalism . . . "Canto negro" is particularly enjoyable . . . [Salud's aria from Falla's "La vida breve"] is one of the finest tracks on the disc -- powerfully emotional and sung with abandon . . . marvelous flamenco-flavored arrangements featuring Daniel Manzanas on guitar and Joel Grare on percussion. All are excellent.

Record Review /
Ira Siff,
Opera News (New York) / 01. February 2012

The concept is utterly intriguing, which is no less than we've come to expect from Petibon.

Petibon’s Tour of Spain

Unique for her dramatic flair, expert musicality, and interpretive powers, soprano Patricia Petibon indulges in her love of Luso-Iberian music

From zarzuela to art song, folk song, the Aria Cantilena of Brazil’s Villa-Lobos, and the traditional Afro-Brazilian Ogundé uareré, Patricia Petibon also samples the new. She includes the world-premiere recording of Nicolas Bacri’s song cycle, which was dedicated to her

Patricia Petibon adds spice by teaming up with flamenco musicians for one-of-a-kind performances of the zarzuela hit Adios, Granada and the folk tune El vito

Beloved favorites are not neglected: Petibon’s take on La tarántula, Marinela, Canto negro, and La petenera sparkle with light and life

The Times wrote about her previous album Rosso: “Her voice is absolutely extraordinary ... After this disc, I am her devoted slave”

Insights

Melancolía
The Mirror of Spain

Spain, and its music and art, have long had a special appeal for Patricia Petibon: “From an early age I was intrigued and fascinated by Spanish culture, by the way the excessive and the subtle are inextricably linked. It glorifies emotions with pride and, at the same time, refinement. It’s a culture that comes from the earth, from the people. Everything about it appealed to me, and in my early recitals I liked to insert some Spanish songs into my American and French programmes. Then, when I went to Madrid to sing in Dialogues des Carmélites, I met the stage director Emilio Sagi, and that led to my opportunity to enter the world of zarzuela. It was Sagi who directed me in Torroba’s Luisa Fernanda in Vienna, where it was wonderful to be singing alongside Plácido Domingo. I found myself surrounded by performers from all kinds of Spanish-speaking backgrounds; they noticed how interested I was in their culture, and that’s how we made a connection, and I learned from real specialists. Spanish artists have a physical sense of the music: for them, it draws its strength from the body, and there I can’t resist making a connection with Baroque music, with dance, of course, and extreme characters – think of Médée or Armide. It also shares the same kind of quality of roughness, of rawness, and voices are used to express emotions, not just to make a lovely sound.”

“I spent a long time thinking about the programme for this disc, creating a mixture of music, and finally I settled on one unifying idea: the feeling of melancholy, which is a reflection of Spain itself. The disc is a journey through different styles, but through folk music as well, which has a strong presence on the disc. The theatrical element is very important, too, and at the centre is the character of Salud in Falla’s La vida breve. She embodies the melancholy of the title, the loss of hope. Melancholy is a balance in life, a sadness that binds us to death. Salud represents the darkest side of melancholy that tends toward tragedy. But this sort of melancholy can also depict the radiance of childhood, of joy and laughter. What I wanted to explore through this disc was the journey between these two poles.”
Following on from a number of attempts to write a popular zarzuela for Madrid, Falla’s early masterpiece, composed in 1905, emerged from the new, deeper understanding of the power and potential of Spanish music that the composer gained under the influence of his teacher, Felipe Pedrell. Unperformed in Spain, the score was among the material Falla took with him when he moved to Paris in 1907, and the first performances were ultimately given in France – in Nice in 1913 and at the Opéra-Comique in Paris a year later. Albéniz had already blazed a trail for Spanish musicians in the French capital, while Debussy and Ravel were, in return, imagining Spain in music for themselves. And in Paris Falla renewed his friendship with fellow Spaniard Joaquín Turina, who was studying with D’Indy in the sober surroundings of the Schola Cantorum. This is the kind of Franco-Spanish cultural exchange that Patricia Petibon instinctively responds to: “It’s no coincidence that as a Frenchwoman I’m drawn to Spain. So many Spanish artists and composers came to Paris, and there was a mutual influence between them and French artists. Falla is the central figure on the disc, not just because his music is rooted in folk culture, but also because of his interest in France. To me, the sound of castanets and las palmas (hand clapping) is simply the sound of Spain, and it was essential to me to have percussion, and classical and Flamenco guitar on the disc, as well as piano and full orchestral accompaniments. But I approach it all with my heart and my French sensibility. I didn’t want to mimic a Spanish identity, but to feel it without disguising what I am.”

While Falla was forging his own personal style from Spanish sources, his older contemporary, Granados, consciously looked back to an earlier Spain in his twelve Tonadillas of 1910–11. The term originally signified a short musical scene; here the tonadillas are self-contained songs, with a focus on the early-19th-century figure of the elaborately dressed maja, as immortalized in the canvases of Goya. Petibon is conscious of the music’s association with the paintings, the “expression of the inner sorrow felt by the majas, characters who are popular yet refined.”

Naturally, zarzuela numbers are on the programme, with “Marinela” from José Serrano Simeón’s Neapolitan set La canción del olvido of 1918, the “Petenera” (a Flamenco song-form) from Torroba’s La marchenera (1928), and the famous “tarántula” song from Giménez’s La tempranica of 1900. “Adiós Granada” from Emigrantes (1905), by Rafael Calleja Gómez and Tomás Barrera Saavedra, is given a Flamenco treatment, while Turina’s impassioned “Cantares”, from his 1917 Poema en forma de canciones, is heard here in the original orchestral version.

Catalan music is represented by Xavier Montsalvatge, who was introduced to the Afro-Hispanic music of Cuba by returning Spanish emigrants to the Caribbean, and used it in his Cinco canciones negras of 1945–6. Cuban-born but European-trained pianist and composer Joaquín Nin y Castellanos embodies many of the characteristics of the collection: he also went to Paris, where he studied and subsequently taught at the Schola Cantorum, explored Baroque keyboard music, and embraced popular Spanish styles, as in the spirited “El vito” from his Veinte cantos populares españoles of 1923. The traditional Brazilian “Ogundé uareré” has unequivocal West African roots in Yoruba culture, and the song is, as Patricia Petibon describes it, “a kind of trance, an invocation to the god of metal”. A glance to the Baroque returns in possibly the most famous Brazilian music of all, the “Aria” from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, where, in Petibon’s vivid imagery, the vocal line is “a velvet ribbon matching the flow of the eight cellos.” Rounding off the programme is a new work written specially for Patricia Petibon, French composer Nicolas Bacri’s four Melodías de la melancolía, settings of texts by the Paris-based Colombian writer Álvaro Escobar-Molina. In the singer’s words, “It was important to complete a melancholy journey with a contemporary work, an opening to the future, and a blend of our two cultures.”

Patricia Petibon’s love for the singers who have long been associated with Spanish repertoire is only a part of her overall feeling for this music: “I love Bidú Sayão, and I was interested to see that she was popular in Paris in French repertoire in the 1930s. And I have an unconditional love for Victoria de los Ángeles. In terms of sound, I was just as keen to find different vocal colours as instrumental ones. I didn’t want to use an operatic voice all the time – sometimes you must forget your training to be able to return to the roots and use your instinct as an interpreter. It was this unresolved blend of colours, raw and refined, popular and learned, that Falla continually sought in his works. The voice must embrace these contrasts, this diversity of culture and language.” Kenneth Chalmers